An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The head of the Federal Aviation Administration just outlined an ambitious goal to upgrade the U.S.'s air traffic control (ATC) system and bring it into the 21st century. According to NPR, most ATC towers and other facilities today feel like they're stuck in the 20th century, with controllers using paper strips and floppy disks to transfer data, while their computers run Windows 95. While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact, their age is a major risk to the nation's critical infrastructure, with the FAA itself saying that the current state of its hardware is unsustainable. "The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips," acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said earlier this week," This is the most important infrastructure project that we've had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees -- this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it." The aviation industry put up a coalition pushing for ATC modernization called Modern Skies, and it even ran an ad telling us that ATC is still using floppy disks and several older technologies to keep our skies safe. [...] Currently, the White House hasn't said what this update will cost. The FAA has already put out a Request For Information to gather data from companies willing to take on the challenge of upgrading the entire system. It also announced several 'Industry Days' so companies can pitch their tech and ideas to the Transportation Department. Duffy said that the Transportation Department aims to complete the project within four years. However, industry experts say this timeline is unrealistic. No matter how long it takes, it's high time that the FAA upgrades the U.S.'s ATC system today after decades of neglect.

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South Asia has warmed far more slowly than the rest of the world over the past four decades with temperatures rising just 0.09C per decade compared to 0.30C elsewhere on land, according to new climate research. Scientists believe this "warming hole" results from two factors that have masked the true impact of global warming: heavy aerosol pollution that reflects sunlight back to space and expanded irrigation that cools air through evaporation. The protective effect is temporary and comes at a deadly cost. Air pollution currently kills between 2 million and 3 million people annually in South Asia, while extreme heat causes 100,000 to 600,000 deaths. As governments reduce pollution and groundwater depletion limits irrigation expansion, atmospheric scientists predict India will warm at twice the rate of the past 20 years. By 2047, the average Indian could experience a four-fold increase in dangerous heat stress days, threatening a region where only 10% of households have air conditioning.

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has called for changes to the roster of officials appointed to oversee the forthcoming election at the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC), the latest twist in a conflict that stretches back years and has left the African regional internet registry in limbo. From a report: AFRINIC is one of the world's five regional internet registries, the governance bodies that delegate and manage IP addresses and autonomous systems numbers in co-ordination with ICANN. The African organization has essentially been dead in the water, operating without a board or CEO since 2022. The problems started in 2020 when AFRINIC alleged that one of its members -- a company called Cloud Innovation -- had breached its agreement with the registry in ways that could lead AFRINIC to reclaim the company's IP address holdings. Cloud Innovation countered that AFRINIC acted improperly and launched multiple lawsuits in Mauritius, the Indian Ocean nation the registry calls home. Other parties also sued AFRINIC for similar reasons. The lawsuits left AFRINIC's bank accounts frozen and meant it was unable to convene a board or run elections. In February 2025, the Supreme Court of Mauritius appointed a receiver to secure AFRINIC's assets and reconstitute its board.

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Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told attendees at the SuperReturn International 2025 conference in Berlin last week that 60% of the 5,500 finance professionals present will be "looking for work" next year due to AI disruption. Smith predicted that while 40% of attendees will adopt AI agents -- programs that autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks -- the remaining majority will need to find new employment as AI transforms the sector. "All of the jobs currently carried out by one billion knowledge workers today would change due to AI," Smith said, clarifying that while jobs won't disappear entirely, they will fundamentally transform.

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Apple announced that macOS 26 "Tahoe" will be the final version to support Intel-based Macs, with future macOS releases running exclusively on Apple Silicon devices (that is, 2020 M1 models and newer). They will, however, continue to receive security updates for a few more years. 9to5Mac reports: In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non-Apple Silicon models of its lineup. macOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac mini for instance. But Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro. Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore macOS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years, however. Going forward, the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards, as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1. M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros followed in 2021.

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Ohio State University is launching a campus-wide AI fluency initiative requiring all students to integrate AI into their studies, aiming to make them proficient in both their major and the responsible use of AI. "Ohio State has an opportunity and responsibility to prepare students to not just keep up, but lead in this workforce of the future," said the university's president, Walter "Ted" Carter Jr. He added: "Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn. In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be [affected] in some way by AI." The Guardian reports: The university said its program will prioritize the incoming freshman class and onward, in order to make every Ohio State graduate "fluent in AI and how it can be responsibly applied to advance their field." [...] Steven Brown, an associate professor of philosophy at the university, told NBC News that after students turned in the first batch of AI-assisted papers he found "a lot of really creative ideas." "My favorite one is still a paper on karma and the practice of returning shopping carts," Brown said. Brown said that banning AI from classwork is "shortsighted," and he encouraged his students to discuss ethics and philosophy with AI chatbots. "It would be a disaster for our students to have no idea how to effectively use one of the most powerful tools that humanity has ever created," Brown said. "AI is such a powerful tool for self-education that we must rapidly adapt our pedagogy or be left in the dust." Separately, Ohio's AI in Education Coalition is working to develop a comprehensive strategy to ensure that the state's K-12 education system, encompassing the years of formal schooling from kindergarten through 12th grade in high school, is prepared for and can help lead the AI revolution. "AI technology is here to stay," then lieutenant governor Jon Husted said last year while announcing an AI toolkit for Ohio's K-12 school districts that he added would ensure the state "is a leader in responding to the challenges and opportunities made possible by artificial intelligence."

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Warner Bros Discovery will split into two separate publicly traded companies -- one focused on its studios and streaming assets like HBO, DC Studios, and HBO Max, and the other on its declining cable networks including CNN and TNT Sports. The move, which unwinds the 2022 WarnerMedia-Discovery merger, is expected by mid-2026 and is "the latest unraveling of decades of media consolidation that created global conglomerates spanning content creation, distribution and in some cases, telecommunications," reports Reuters. From the report: The new streaming-and-studios company will include Warner Bros, DC Studios and HBO Max - the crown jewels of WBD's entertainment library. The networks unit, which will hold up to a 20% stake in its counterpart, will house CNN, TNT Sports and Bleacher Report. CEO David Zaslav will lead the streaming and studios unit, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will head the networks unit. The separation will be structured as a tax-free transaction and is expected to be completed by mid-2026. "We've continued to analyze how our industry is evolving," Zaslav told investors. "The right path forward became increasingly clear ... to separate global networks and streaming and studios into two independent, publicly traded companies." Most of the company's debt would be held by the global networks company. WBD had gross debt of $38 billion as of March. The company said it secured a $17.5 billion bridge loan from J.P. Morgan that it would use to restructure its debt.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple is launching what it calls the Foundation Models framework, which the company says will let developers tap into its AI models in an offline, on-device fashion. Onstage at WWDC 2025 on Monday, Apple VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said that the Foundation Models framework will let apps use on-device AI models created by Apple to drive experiences. These models ship as a part of Apple Intelligence, Apple's family of models that power a number of iOS features and capabilities. "For example, if you're getting ready for an exam, an app like Kahoot can create a personalized quiz from your notes to make studying more engaging," Federighi said. "And because it happens using on-device models, this happens without cloud API costs [] We couldn't be more excited about how developers can build on Apple intelligence to bring you new experiences that are smart, available when you're offline, and that protect your privacy." In a blog post, Apple says that the Foundation Models framework has native support for Swift, Apple's programming language for building apps for its various platforms. The company claims developers can access Apple Intelligence models with as few as three lines of code. Guided generation, tool calling, and more are all built into the Foundation Models framework, according to Apple. Automattic is already using the framework in its Day One journaling app, Apple says, while mapping app AllTrails is tapping the framework to recommend different hiking routes.

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At WWDC 2025, Apple announced a new dedicated Games app coming to Mac, iPhone, and iPad with features like leaderboards, matchmaking, and integration with Apple Arcade. Engadget's Jessica Conditt describes it as "a revamp of Game Center" that behaves "more like a modern gaming hub, a la Xbox or GOG Galaxy." From the report: You can see what your friends are playing and challenge them to specific feats in certain titles. The library tab will include every game you've ever downloaded from the App Store, allowing you to booth them up right there. On Mac, a Games app overlay makes communication tools, audio controls, Bluetooth connections and live battery levels accessible at any time.

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According to Bloomberg, several major Chinese AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent, have temporarily disabled certain chatbot features during the gaokao college entrance exams to prevent cheating. "Popular AI apps, including Alibaba's Qwen and ByteDance's Doubao, have stopped picture recognition features from responding to questions about test papers, while Tencent's Yuanbao, Moonshot's Kimi have suspended photo-recognition services entirely during exam hours," adds The Verge. From the report: The rigorous multi-day "gaokao" exams are sat by more than 13.3 million Chinese students between June 7-10th, each fighting to secure one of the limited spots at universities across the country. Students are already banned from using devices like phones and laptops during the hours-long tests, so the disabling of AI chatbots serves as an additional safety net to prevent cheating during exam season. When asked to explain the suspension, Bloomberg reports the Yuanbao and Kimi chatbots responded that functions had been disabled "to ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations." Similarly, the DeepSeek AI tool that went viral earlier this year is also blocking its service during specific hours "to ensure fairness in the college entrance examination,"according to The Guardian. The Guardian notes that the news is being driven by students on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. "The gaokao entrance exam incites fierce competition as it's the only means to secure a college placement in China, driving concerns that students may try to improve their chances with AI tools," notes The Verge.

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Apple unveiled iPadOS 26 at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, introducing what appears to be the most significant productivity overhaul in the tablet operating system's history. The update brings dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners, a menu bar accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement, and Expose for viewing all open windows in a tiled array. The new windowing system allows users to seamlessly close, minimize, resize, and tile app windows while maintaining the iPad's touch-first interface. When users reopen apps, windows return to their last position and size. The menu bar, a longtime Mac staple, provides access to familiar commands like File, Edit, and View through either touch or trackpad controls. Apple is also enhancing the Files app with resizable columns and collapsible folders, while bringing the Preview app to iPad for the first time with PDF editing capabilities and Apple Pencil support. The update introduces Background Tasks for computationally intensive processes and new audio features including Voice Isolation and Local capture for video calls.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube videos may be getting a bit more pernicious soon. Google's dominant video platform has spent years removing discriminatory and conspiracy content from its platform in accordance with its usage guidelines, but the site is now reportedly adopting a lighter-touch approach to moderation. A higher bar for content removal will allow more potentially inflammatory content to remain up in the "public interest." [...] Beginning late last year, YouTube began informing moderators they should err on the side of caution when removing videos that are in the public interest. That includes user uploads that discuss issues like elections, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship. Previously, YouTube's policy told moderators to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated policies. Now, the exception cutoff has been increased to half. In addition, staff are now told to bring issues to managers if they are uncertain rather than removing the content themselves. "Recognizing that the definition of 'public interest' is always evolving, we update our guidance for these exceptions to reflect the new types of discussion we see on the platform today," YouTube's Nicole Bell told the New York Times. "Our goal remains the same: to protect free expression on YouTube while mitigating egregious harm." Most of the videos hosted on YouTube won't be affected by this change, the company says. "These exceptions apply to a small fraction of the videos on YouTube, but are vital for ensuring important content remains available," a YouTube spokesperson tells Ars. "This practice allows us to prevent, for example, an hours-long news podcast from being removed for showing one short clip of violence."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Seagate has announced a new 4TB version of its storage expansion card for the Xbox Series X and S consoles. It's the first time the company has introduced a new capacity since launching 2TB and 512GB versions of the expansion card in late 2021. The 4TB card is available starting today through Seagate's online store and Best Buy for $499.99, but is discounted to $429.99 as part of a limited-time launch promotion. For comparison, the Xbox Series S starts at $379.99, while the Xbox Series X starts at $599.99.

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Apple today introduced Liquid Glass, a new design language that brings transparency and glass shine effects across macOS, iPadOS, iOS, and its other software platforms. Alan Dye, Apple's VP of human interface, described the update as the company's "broadest design update, ever" and "the first time we're introducing a universal design across our platforms." The design overhaul adds glass-like elements throughout iOS 26, including glass edges that appear when users swipe up on the lock screen and similar transparent effects across system interfaces. The changes represent Apple's most significant departure from the iOS 7 design philosophy that has shaped the mobile operating system for over a decade since 2013, when Apple moved away from skeuomorphism. App developers will need to adjust their applications to accommodate the new visual language.

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United Natural Foods (UNFI), a major distributor of groceries to Whole Foods and other retailers, said on Monday that it was hit by a cyberattack, warning of disruptions to its ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders. From a report: UNFI said in a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it became aware of unauthorized access to its IT systems last Thursday, and began shutting down portions of its network. The filing added that the company has "implemented workarounds for certain operations in order to continue servicing its customers where possible," but noted that the intrusion has caused ongoing disruptions to its business operations. The Providence, Rhode Island-based company is one of the largest grocery distributors in North America, selling fresh produce, goods, and food products to more than 30,000 stores and supermarket locations across the U.S. and Canada. UNFI also serves as the "primary distributor" to Whole Foods, the Amazon-owned grocery chain. Last year, the two companies extended their long-running contract until May 2032.

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The world's oceans are in worse health than realised, scientists have said today, as they warn that a key measurement shows we are "running out of time" to protect marine ecosystems. From a report: Ocean acidification, often called the "evil twin" of the climate crisis, is caused when carbon dioxide is rapidly absorbed by the ocean, where it reacts with water molecules leading to a fall in the pH level of the seawater. It damages coral reefs and other ocean habitats and, in extreme cases, can dissolve the shells of marine creatures. Until now, ocean acidification had not been deemed to have crossed its "planetary boundary." The planetary boundaries are the natural limits of key global systems -- such as climate, water and wildlife diversity -- beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing. Six of the nine had been crossed already, scientists said last year. However, a new study by the UK's Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), the Washington-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University's Co-operative Institute for Marine Resources Studies found that ocean acidification's "boundary" was also reached about five years ago.

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A cybersecurity researcher was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media's own tests. From a report: The issue has since been fixed but at the time presented a privacy issue in which even hackers with relatively few resources could have brute forced their way to peoples' personal information. "I think this exploit is pretty bad since it's basically a gold mine for SIM swappers," the independent security researcher who found the issue, who goes by the handle brutecat, wrote in an email. [...] In mid-April, we provided brutecat with one of our personal Gmail addresses in order to test the vulnerability. About six hours later, brutecat replied with the correct and full phone number linked to that account. "Essentially, it's bruting the number," brutecat said of their process. Brute forcing is when a hacker rapidly tries different combinations of digits or characters until finding the ones they're after. Typically that's in the context of finding someone's password, but here brutecat is doing something similar to determine a Google user's phone number. Brutecat said in an email the brute forcing takes around one hour for a U.S. number, or 8 minutes for a UK one. For other countries, it can take less than a minute, they said. In an accompanying video demonstrating the exploit, brutecat explains an attacker needs the target's Google display name. They find this by first transferring ownership of a document from Google's Looker Studio product to the target, the video says. They say they modified the document's name to be millions of characters, which ends up with the target not being notified of the ownership switch. Using some custom code, which they detailed in their write up, brutecat then barrages Google with guesses of the phone number until getting a hit.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta is in talks to make a multibillion-dollar investment into AI startup Scale AI, according to people familiar with the matter. The financing could exceed $10 billion in value, some of the people said, making it one of the largest private company funding events of all time. [...] Scale AI, whose customers include Microsoft and OpenAI, provides data labeling services to help companies train machine-learning models and has become a key beneficiary of the generative AI boom. The startup was last valued at about $14 billion in 2024, in a funding round that included backing from Meta and Microsoft.

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Apple researchers have found that state-of-the-art "reasoning" AI models like OpenAI's o3-mini, Gemini (with thinking mode-enabled), Claude 3.7, DeepSeek-R1 face complete performance collapse [PDF] beyond certain complexity thresholds when tested on controllable puzzle environments. The finding raises questions about the true reasoning capabilities of large language models. The study, which examined models using Tower of Hanoi, checker jumping, river crossing, and blocks world puzzles rather than standard mathematical benchmarks, found three distinct performance regimes that contradict conventional assumptions about AI reasoning progress. At low complexity levels, standard language models surprisingly outperformed their reasoning-enhanced counterparts while using fewer computational resources. At medium complexity, reasoning models demonstrated advantages, but both model types experienced complete accuracy collapse at high complexity levels. Most striking was the counterintuitive finding that reasoning models actually reduced their computational effort as problems became more difficult, despite operating well below their token generation limits. Even when researchers provided explicit solution algorithms, requiring only step-by-step execution rather than creative problem-solving, the models' performance failed to improve significantly. The researchers noted fundamental inconsistencies in how models applied learned strategies across different problem scales, with some models successfully handling 100-move sequences in one puzzle type while failing after just five moves in simpler scenarios.

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Vox publishes a story about "the quiet revolutions that have prevented millions of cancer deaths.... "The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago... " The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn't happen by accident — it's the compound interest of three revolutions. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people's cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20-39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It's generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival... According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise. Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer... From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people's lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient's own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see. The article begins with some recent quotes from Jon Gluck, who was told after a cancer diagnosis that he had as little as 18 months left to live — 22 years ago...

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